Crime Watch

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In the middle of the 1980s Roy Jenkins, resting on his authority as one of the most respected Home Secretaries of the postwar era, announced that governments should not promise to reduce crime because, in practice, there was little they could do about it.

A decade later Michael Howard set out to prove him wrong, introducing a range of new policies to increase the punishments for crime and the chance of getting caught. Jack Straw, who succeeded him, intensified the policy. And what happened? Crime started to fall and keeps falling.